Mr. Dettweiler has now turned from
recovering lost treasures to prospecting for natural ones that litter the
seabed: craggy deposits rich in gold and silver, copper and cobalt, lead and
zinc. A new understanding of marine geology has led to the discovery of
hundreds of these unexpected ore bodies, known as massive sulfides because of
their sulfurous nature.

These finds are fueling a gold rush
as nations, companies and entrepreneurs race to stake claims to the
sulfide-rich areas, which dot the volcanic springs of the frigid seabed. The
prospectors — motivated by dwindling resources on land as well as record prices
for gold and other metals — are busy hauling up samples and assessing deposits
valued at trillions of dollars.

“We’ve had extreme success,” Mr.
Dettweiler said in a recent interview about the deepwater efforts of his
company, Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Fla.

Skeptics once likened mining the
deep to looking for riches on the moon. No more. Progress in marine geology,
predictions of metal shortages in the decades ahead and improving access to the
abyss are combining to make it real.

Environmentalists have expressed
growing alarm, saying too little research has been done on the risks of seabed
mining. The industry has responded with studies, reassurance and upbeat
conferences.

The technological advances center on
new robots, sensors and other equipment, some of it derived from the offshore oil and gas industry. Ships lower exploratory gear on long
tethers and send down sharp drills that gnaw into the rocky seabed. All of this
underwater machinery is making it more and more feasible to find, map and
recover seabed riches.

Industrial powers — including
government-supported groups in China, Japan and South Korea — are hunting for
sulfides in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. And private companies like
Odyssey have made hundreds of deep assessments and claims in the volcanic zones
around Pacific island nations: Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, New Zealand, the Solomon
Islands and Papua New Guinea.

The International Seabed Authority,
a sleepy United Nations body located in Jamaica that presides over mineral
rights on the high seas, an area its officials like to characterize as 51
percent of the earth’s surface, has found itself besieged with sulfide queries.

“We are entering a new stage,” Nii
Allotey Odunton of Ghana, secretary general of the authority, told a meeting in
November.

Since the Pacific islands control
mineral rights in their territorial waters, they can negotiate mining deals
more easily than the seabed authority, which tends to plod along by
international consensus.

Odyssey Marine Exploration, which
recently expanded from shipwreck recovery into deep prospecting, began scouring
the Pacific waters in 2010, discovering far more gold, silver and copper than
expected.

Scientists once thought the main
source of wealth in the deep sea lay in beds of potato-size rocks that could be
mined for such common metals as iron and nickel. In the 1960s and ’70s,
entrepreneurs tried to scoop them up, but the rewards never offset the high
cost of exploration, retrieval and transportation.

Things began to change in 1979 with
the discovery of “black smokers”, sulfurous mounds and towers that gush blistering-hot
water. The smokers turned out to dot the 46,000 miles of volcanic fissures that
gird the global seabed like seams on a baseball.

Scientists found that the smokers
formed as hot water rose through the volcanic rocks, hit icy seawater and shed
a variety of minerals that slowly coalesced into eerie mounds and chimneys.
One, found off Washington State and nicknamed Godzilla, stood more than 15
stories high.

This “treasure mapping” of Afghanistan is being conducted in
anticipation of the opening of the bidding process for private companies
who are no doubt salivating as they wait in the wings for their
opportunity to gobble up the natural wealth of the impoverished and
war-torn nation and, subsequently, turn it into massive profits.

As part of the DOD’s Task Force for Business and
Stability Operation (TFBSO), the DOD and USGS (United States Geological
Survey) are working together to “map more than 70 percent of the
country’s surface and identify potential high-value deposits of copper,
gold, iron, and other minerals.” Obviously, the initiative also includes
the Afghan Ministry of Mines and the Afghan Geological Survey.

In describing the TFBSO, task force official James Bullion stated that,
“The task force is a Defense Department organization charged to help
spur and grow the private-sector economy in Afghanistan, . . . and
clearly, the mineral and oil and gas extractive areas are critical to
that effort.”

He continues by saying, “The work that the U.S. Geological Survey has
done has been critical to the whole process. In essence, what they’ve
done is built a treasure map for Afghanistan, which is full of hidden
mineral and oil and gas treasures.”

However, the term “hidden” is only a matter of perspective. While the
mineral, oil, and gas reserves might have been hidden to the vast
majority of the world’s population, they were anything but to the major
governments that rule over them.

For instance, even the DOD press release admits that the USGS obtained
data form a former Soviet mission that took place over 10 years to
“help” the Afghan government with the mapping of these treasures. Much
of the admitted data was anywhere from 50 to 75 years old, yet there is
no doubt that the current invaders were well aware of its existence long
before boots ever hit the ground.

Indeed, it is an interesting coincidence that two superpower invaders in
modern history would place so much emphasis on the geological mapping
of an area consumed with so much turmoil and tactical resistance.

Nevertheless, the USGS, in conjunction with other groups and agencies,
is using hyperspectral instrumentation in order to map the Afghan
treasure trove.

As USGS Director Marcia McNutt explains, “Hyperspectral data uses the
reflectance of light and uses the fact that different minerals reflect
light in different wavelength bands. Every mineral has its own signature
or fingerprint.”

She also stated that the hyperspectral instrument “can be used in a
place where there’s no vegetative cover, and Afghanistan happens to have
almost no vegetation and it is resource-laden. And because of plate
tectonic properties, . . . it has been tectonically uplifted and
tectonically unroofed to reveal at the surface the mother lode of
resources.”

During
a period of 43 days and 23 flights, the USGS flew close to 23,000 miles
across Afghanistan. In addition, NASA contributed its own aircraft in
2004 for the same purpose. It was actually the NASA mission that helped
map the 70 percent of the country mentioned earlier.

McNutt says that hyperspectral data has accelerated the ability to map
mineral deposits in a time frame measurable by decades. Of course, she
states that the purpose of doing so is to identify the “most promising
areas for Afghan economic development.” In reality, however, one should
read “Afghan economic development” as “International Corporate Raiding.”

As for what has been found, Jack Medlin of the USGS International
Programs office and specialist for the Asia-Pacific region, stated that,
“We have identified somewhere between 10 and 12 world-class copper,
gold, iron ore [and] rare earth deposits that no one knew were there.”

While the reader would be well-advised to ignore the “that no one knew
were there” part of the statement, Medlin continues by saying, “In our
2007 publication, we gave an estimate of undiscovered mineral resources
for the country, and . . . you can add up the tonnages of copper, lead,
gold, iron, silver, and so forth. . . . But this county has many more
world-class mineral deposits than most countries in the world, if not
more than any country.”

It is a very interesting coincidence then, that this country would also
be the target of continual invasion and occupation throughout history.

However,
it is obvious that the mineral, oil, and gas deposits were well-known
amongst the oligarchical world elite for some time. This, of course,
includes the “American” branches of the elite club as well.

This is what Eric Blair refers to in his article “Afghanistan Mineral Deposits Was ‘Economic Prize’ All Along,”
when he states, “In fact, this stunning new discovery has been the
target of American hegemony for well over a decade. Indeed, it may well
be the reason for the sustained War in Afghanistan . . .”

Blair has great reason for making this pronouncement. Indeed, he goes on
to quote Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy and Its Geographic Imperatives. On page 124 of the
book, Brzezinski states, “. . . the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.”

Earlier, on pages 30-31, Brzezinski wrote,

America’s global primacy is directly dependent
on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian
continent is sustained . . . A power that dominates Eurasia would
control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically
productive regions . . . most of the world’s physical wealth is there as
well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil.

Mr. Brzezinski is well informed of world affairs indeed.

Regardless, the Armed Forces Press Service press release,
written by Cheryl Pellerin, states that no stone will be left unturned
in the rush to distribute the wealth that rightly belongs to the Afghan
people. It reads:

Once a company wins a bid for an Afghan sites,
it will gather all information about the site, including the
hyperspectral data and any geologic, geochemical and geophysical
information, he [Medlin]said. It will also send its own geologists to
the site to do detailed mapping and arrange for detailed airborne
gravity and magnetic studies, Medlin said, which gives the company a
subsurface three-dimensional picture of the ore deposit.

This
is quite the service indeed, since such exploration seems like it would
be something that the companies themselves would undertake when
exploring new territory for minerals, oil, and gas. But, why would they
do so when they have the taxpayer to get that part of the project out of
the way for them?

Beyond the obvious lucrative aspects of the minerals mentioned above, however, it should be noted that just the deposits of lithium
under Afghan soil is expected to rake in astronomical profits which is
described as being in the trillions of dollars by internal Pentagon
memos quoted by the New York Times.

The phrase now being repeated among those aware of the hidden Afghan
wealth is that the lithium deposits alone could turn Afghanistan into
the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

Indeed, with the rapidly increasing transition to total cellphone use
and electronic communications, directional, and operational systems,
lithium will only increase in value as time progresses.

Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Eklil Hakimi has also
recently stated that, “The estimated direct revenue to be generated by
royalties and taxes from the extractive industries could reach up to
$1.5 billion by 2016 and exceed $3.7 billion by 2026 and will become a
major source of employment, with 165,000 jobs anticipated by 2016 and up
to half a million by 2026.”

Of course, Ambassador Hakimi’s optimism might be just a bit premature.
The likelihood that the revenue coming from the extraction of these
minerals will find its way to the Afghan people is extremely low if
history is anything to go by. Jobs, however, as underpayed, overworked,
and expendable mine workers might actually be available; so at least
part of his statement has the potential of coming true.

In the end, those that accused their governments of marching to war in
Afghanistan for ulterior motives have been proved right yet again.
Whether the reason for military invasion and occupation of the
devastated nation was the result of a desire to control the opium trade, minerals, oil, and gas, or to secure pipelines and strategic geopolitical positioning, the fact is that the false flag attacks of 9/11 [1] served only as the justification [2] – not the reason. Indeed, in my experience, there is rarely only one reason for any move that is made by the ruling elite.

The only real question is how many times those have studied history must
be proven right in hindsight before the masses begin to take notice in
the present.